In residential, light commercial and other types of construction, a carpenter on the job site must make cross-cuts and rip cuts in long pieces of dimension lumber (either construction or finished lumber), often of lengths up to or even exceeding 14 feet, and/or in large area panels, such as conventional plywood or the like building panels which come in sheets up to or beyond four feet wide by eight feet long. These cuts should be accurately made to provide a strong and accurately made building structure and a satisfactory finish appearance.
To supply such bulky stock with the stable support required for accurate and safe cutting has in the past required the use of heavy, bulky, nonportable professional table saws of the type intended to be fixedly installed in a commercial woodworking shop. However, these are entirely unsatisfactory for use on a residential or commercial building or remodeling site because they are too heavy and bulky to be moved about on a job site or to be moved back and forth between a job site and a pickup truck by two men, they are excessively costly, and despite their large size they still normally do not provide a table area of width and length sufficient to comfortably handle and accurately guide large stock such as conventionally sized building panels, particularly if cuts are to be made by one man without an assistant.
To achieve the portability needed for transport around a job site or from job site to job site in a carpenter's pickup or panel truck, compact and lightweight table saws and tables for mounting of electric hand circular saws have been known. However, unless further means are provided, these units are normally not provided with supports capable of supporting the table surface at the normal working height (approximately waist height), and such portable saw tables and thus often placed directly on the floor with the work support surface only a foot or so above the floor, which makes cutting cumbersome and unsafe. Moreover, the table area on such compact table saws or saw tables is generally so small (for example typically less than four square feet) that it is difficult to accurately crosscut or rip substantial lengths of dimension lumber and the rip guide cannot be positioned far enough from the blade to permit many ripping cuts on four by eight foot panels.
Hand-held electric circular saws are widely used by carpenters on residential and commercial building and remodeling sites because of their portability. However, it is difficult to achieve accuracy in cutting either dimension lumber or panels without recourse to accessory guiding devices which tend to be time consuming to use and in many instances cumbersone and unreliable for highly accurate work. These disadvantages are particularly true in the case of large panels which present additional difficulties in supporting of the panel during cutting.
Accordingly, the objects and purposes of this invention include provision of:
A portable table assembly for a hand electric circular saw which supports the saw blade at a convenient working height and provides adequate support and guidance for crosscutting and ripping of long dimension lumber pieces and for conventional panel material, such as four by eight foot sheets of plywood or the like.
An apparatus, as aforesaid, which provides an unusually large area saw table, which in a single table surface provides sufficient width for positioning a rip fence from the blade by more than half the width of a conventional four by eight foot panel from the saw blade, and which provides sufficient fore-aft table width as to permit one man to readily rip long dimension lumber or conventional plywood panels.
An apparatus, as aforesaid, collapsible to form a plurality of units variously nestable and stowable within each other to provide a compact, relatively lightweight, easily transported unitary package, which package can readily be transported by one man and quickly taken down or set up by one man.
An apparatus, as aforesaid, capable of using a wide variety of brands and types of hand electric circular saws, in which the hand circular saw can be readily and quickly mounted or demounted on the apparatus, and in which the hand circular saw may be left mounted on the apparatus when the several units of the latter are in their nested and stowed unitary package condition for transport or storage.
Other objects and purposes of this invention will be apparent to persons acquainted with apparatus of this general type upon reading the following specification and inspecting the accompanying drawings.